“Cake, and grief counseling will be available at the conclusion of the test. Thank you for helping us help you help us all.”

“The Enrichment Center is required to remind you that you will be baked, and then there will be cake.” (subtitles say: “The Enrichment Center is required to remind you that you will be baked [garbled] cake.”)

“OK, the test is over now. You win! Go back to the recovery annex for your cake!”

“Uh oh. Somebody cut the cake. I told them to wait for you, but they cut it anyway. There is still some left, though, if you hurry back.”

“I’m not kidding now. Turn back or I WILL kill you… I’m going to kill you, and all the cake is gone, you don’t even care, do you?”

Shahrin (or should I say Dato’ Shahrin), your late dad (Ranhill Group Deputy Chief Executive Datuk Zahari) left one memorable yet cliché idiom as me and Rashid (now doing Ph.D in France) had an evening conversation while the rest of your family and friends seemed more interested with the Kelantanese dikir barat next room. This was in 2002, in Newcastle upon Tyne, UK. While you’re still studying in Northumbria University. And your age seem more youthful than the media stated 31 years old — since it would be ridiculous for a 20-ish UMNO lad to get a Dato’, innit?

“Jack of all trades, master of none”.

He said but he left out “though ofttimes better than master of one.” The latter seem to ring true with your wedded thespian. She seems to be the cultured type. A professional model, an aspiring actress and sadly a shady poet — suspected with plagiarism.

Oh, dear. A little knowledge is a dangerous thing when it leads one to equate Natasha Hudson with Shakespeare and Dante Alighieri.

Yes, Shakespeare and Dante “plagiarised” in the sense that all creative artists at the time did — and in fact many of them *did* do so anonymously, because the concepts of the “author” and of “originality” were all but non-existent then. Poets, musicians, visual artists — they all not only consciously based their work on their predecessors’ work (often as homage), but also freely dipped into the communal font of stories/musical gestures/artistic subjects. Shakespeare and Chaucer and Dante and Milton weren’t inventing plots of their own, because that is not what writers did at the time. And they may even have reused exact phrasing here and there, but the reason we remember them and not all their contemporaries who were all also freely “plagiarising” each other is that they did it better — they took what was considered to be their raw material and made it something *better,* not patently worse.

If someone wants to say the same about Ms. Hudson (i.e. that her “poems” are better than the originals), they should certainly feel free to do so, and then I can laugh at them from this safe and fortunate distance.

In any case, Ms. Hudson’s superiority/inferiority to her sources is somewhat irrelevant, because in this day and age we *do* have the notions of authorship and originality and copyright and so on and so forth. To accuse Shakespeare and Dante of plagiarism is not analogous to the US lecturing people on human rights, however much satisfaction it might give one to throw in their cause-of-the-day into this argument — it’s more like accusing cavemen of adultery.

“I was so taken in by Tim Burton’s books and was thinking that it would be nice to have my book feature illustrations too. So I decided to have illustrations for my Malay book Puisi Indah Si Pari-Pari,which has 20 poems in it.”